50
PARTISAN REVIEW
with the sense that now at last they were about to touch the bio–
graphical, "And the date of your last period?" Dottie supplied it,
and the doctor glanced at her desk calendar. "Very good," she said.
"Go into the bathroom, empty your bladder, and take off your girdle
and step-ins; you may leave your slip on, but unfasten your bras–
siere, please."
Dottie did not mind the pelvic examination or the fitting. Her
bad moment came when she was learning how to insert the pessary
herself. Though she was usually good with her hands and well co–
ordinated, she felt suddenly unnerved by the scrutiny of the doctor
and the nurse, so exploratory and impersonal, like the doctor's rubber
glove.
As
she was trying to fold the pessary, the slippery thing, all
covered with jelly, jumped out of her grasp and shot across the room
and hit the sterilizer. Dottie could have died. But apparently this
was nothing new to the doctor and the nurse. "Try again, Dorothy,"
said the doctor calmly, selecting another diaphragm of the correct
size from the drawer. And, as though to provide a distraction, she
went on to give a little lecture on the history of the pessary, while
watching Dottie's struggles out of the corner of her eye : how a medi–
cated plug had been known to the ancient Greeks and Jews and
Egyptians, how Margaret Sanger had found the present diaphragm
in Holland, how the long fight had been waged through the courts.
. . . Dottie had read all this, but she did not like to say so to this
dark, stately woman, moving among her instruments like a priestess
in the temple. As everybody knew from the newspapers, the doctor
herself had been arrested only a few years before, in a raid on a
birth-control clinic, and then been freed by the court. To hear her
talk on the subject of her lifelong mission was an honor, like touching
the mantle of history, and Dottie felt awed.
"Private practice must be rather a letdown," she suggested, sym–
pathetically. To a dynamic person like the doctor, fitting girls like
herself must be a tame end, she thought sincerely, to a gallant career.
"There's still a great work to be done, in education," sighed the
doctor, removing the diaphragm with a short nod of approval. She
motioned Dottie down from the table. "So many of our clinic patients
won't use the pessary when we've fitted them or won't use it regu–
larly." The nurse bobbed her white-capped head and made a clucking
noise. "Those are the ones, aren't they, doctor, that need to limit
